Thanks..perhaps something else caused it then, not sure what. I will add bleachbit to the desktop and play with it, I had all the options checked except memory and thought free disk space or ds store may have been a bad choice as I have no idea what .ds_store does.cheers

You should look to see if it logs activity anywhere and take a look to see what its been doing. Like I said, the bootloader normally lives in the first 512 (called MBR) sectors of the drive or partition (called bootsector). In rare ocasions the bootloader is written to a binary file within the filesystem but this requires a significant diviation from the standard procedures and is normally done manually.

Yes, in this case I did a dual boot with win xp and chose mbr as a location for lilo. I do not recall adding anything since the last boot which was fine. so blamed it on bleachbit but perhaps something else going on...will have a look for logs, thanks. think the ds_store is a mac thing and pops up when adding apples to win and linux networks so do not need that checked at the moment.